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FINALLY!! For over a year now I’ve binge watched debates, documentaries, and binge read History books at about 7 different libraries. I’m not proud of the fact that my late fees are exponentially increasing… Why? Because learning should never stop, and quite frankly I miss academia, I miss the environment of bright intellectual people on their quests for knowledge, and the smell of old books with yellowed pages. I began an intense research project on my own time. The list of sources is excruciatingly extensive so I have listed it on the bottom for anyone and everyone interested in History who wants to read up.

The Caveat for my exploration is what I’ve observed as the bitter hatred from Neo-atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens [R.I.P.], Daniel Dennett, Lawrence M. Krauss, etc. Teaching, inspiring, and encouraging millions to hate and mock like they do. It’s profuse in their books, essays, social media interactions, and debates online. You’ve seen them, you’ve probably quoted some youtube highlights, which are edited from debates that they’ve either lost or got trapped going in circles, the infinite regress, and superbly edited to make them seem like victors, or “Brights” as Dawkins puts it, in this dark, dark world. All these men who according to Dr. William Lane Craig [and many other logicians, scientists, physicists, mathematicians, etc.] lack philosophical integrity. Michael Ruse, the atheist philosopher of biology, has written an interesting post about the extremism and intellectual failures of the “New Atheists” calling them intellectual cowards, “Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing. As I have said elsewhere, for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the ontological argument. If we criticized gene theory with as little knowledge as Dawkins has of religion and philosophy, he would be rightly indignant. (He was just this when, thirty years ago, Mary Midgeley went after the selfish gene concept without the slightest knowledge of genetics.) Conversely, I am indignant at the poor quality of the argumentation in Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and all of the others in that group. I have written elsewhere that The God Delusion makes me ashamed to be an atheist. Let me say that again. Let me say also that I am proud to be the focus of the invective of the new atheists. They are a bloody disaster and I want to be on the front line of those who say so.”

These 4+ horsemen of the militant atheist elite also unanimously agree that ALL atheists [all means all] should be militant and propagate hate and the base ridicule of ALL “Religulous ” people [let’s include comedian Bill Maher to the list]. This hatred will do no good in our pluralist society and I’m not too far from presuming, that it exacerbates religious persecution across the globe and spark fires of dissension that could be avoided if they just took a chill pill and learned from Carl Sagan’s peaceable example. What is currently the bullying of religious people by these militant neo-atheists in the west, will pave the way toward more martyrdom in the dystopic future of what is currently an overall, peaceable, pluralist world. Like Ravi Zacharias [RZIM] has said, “Dawkins should try and talk the way he does in the middle-east, his privileged position as professor in a Christian school is nothing short of ironic.” Imagine that!! A world that is void of diversity… No more challenges, no religion, Imagine, like John Lennon [the Beatle] only the doctrines of materialism, naturalism, hate mongering and power… oh wait… we already did that in the 20th century. Imagine, like Vladimir Lenin [the Dictator] said, “The goal of Socialism is Communism” and to get to the point ” Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.” Karl Marx himself said Communism begins where atheism begins.” I for one firmly believe what Martin Luther King Jr. reiterated [from what Yeshua of Nazareth said 2,000 years ago] that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive our hate; only love can do that.” Love is and will always be the only way I choose to live… #LoveEveryoneAlways

Why else did I do this? Is it to prove once and for all in my sphere of influence that Humans suck?Yes.Is it also to show the startling statistical death toll difference between religious vs. nonreligious [secular] leaders?

Yes.Why?
Because let’s face it… “for scientists like Richard Dawkins and his cronies, who are persuaded that there is no God, there is no finer pleasure than recounting the history of religious brutality and persecution. Remember those

YouTube videos I mentioned earlier? More than half of all the debates I’ve watched seem to be them going back to the Muslim conquests, the Crusades, Sam Harris’s personal favorite, the Spanish Inquisition, a recount of Jewish canaanite conquests. How “religion doesn’t have a monopoly on morality” that is another HUGE essay bubbling inside me. But I assure you, like prominent atheist Dr. Ruse said, none of these men are experts in history, [especially ancient hebrew history, they are always quoting belligerently and haphazardly out of context] and even more so logic. It amazes me how they gloss over the most brutal, bloodiest century of ALL human history, the 20th century. The first secular century of human history. There is no need to argue the point. A great deal of human suffering has been caused by religious fanaticism. If the inquisition no longer has the power to compel our indignation, the Moslem world often seems quite prepared to carry the burden of exuberant depravity in its place. [Judaism and Christianity easily exceed over 17,000,000 murders throughout Human History]

Nonetheless, there is this awkward fact. The twentieth century was NOT an age of faith, and it was awful. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot will never be counted among the religious leaders of mankind. Nor can anyone argue that the horrors of the twentieth century were unanticipated. Although they came as a shock, they did not come as a surprise. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov exclaims that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. Throughout the nineteenth century, as religious conviction seeped out of the institutions of Western culture, poets and philosophers had the uneasy feeling that its withdrawal might signal the ascension of great evil in the world. In this they were right. What gives Karamazov’s warning [for that is what it is] its power is just that it has become part of a most up-to-date hypothetical syllogism:

The first premise:

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.

And the second:

If science is true, then God does not exist.

The conclusion:

If science is true, then everything is permitted.

In 2007, a number of scientists gathered in a conference entitled “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival” in order to attack religious thought and congratulate one another on their fearlessness in so doing. The physicist Steven Weinberg delivered an address. As one of the authors of the theory of electroweak unification, the work for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize, he is a figure of great stature. “Religion,” he affirmed, “is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion”. In speaking this, Weinberg was warmly applauded, not one member of his audience asking the question one might have thought pertinent: Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.

If the facts about the twentieth century are an inconvenience for scientific atheism, suitably informed thought may always find a way to deny them. The psychologist Steven Pinker has thus introduced into the discussion the remarkable claim that “something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.” The good news is unrelenting: “On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture.” “Some of the evidence,” Pinker goes on to say, “has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

Here is rather a more accurate assessment of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Anyone persuaded that they represent a “shockingly happy picture” should make the modest imaginative effort to discern the immense weight of human misery conveyed by these statistics:

First World War (1914–18): 15 million

Russian Civil War (1917–22): 9 million

Soviet Union, Stalin’s regime (1924–53): 20 million

Second World War (1937–45): 55 million

Chinese Civil War (1945–49): 2.5 million

People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong’s regime (1949–75): 40 million

Tibet (1950 et seq.): 600,000

Congo Free State (1886–1908): 8 million

Mexico (1910–20): 1 million

Turkish massacres of Armenians (1915–23): 1.5 million

China (1917–28): 800,000

China, Nationalist era (1928–37): 3.1 million

Korean War (1950–53): 2.8 million

North Korea (1948 et seq.): 2 million

Rwanda and Burundi (1959–95): 1.35 million

Second Indochina War (1960–75): 3.5 million

Ethiopia (1962–92): 400,000

Nigeria (1966–70): 1 million

Bangladesh (1971): 1.25 million

Cambodia, Khmer Rouge (1975–78): 1.65 million

Mozambique (1975–92): 1 million[I was here one of the highest amputee rates in the world because floods washed all the land mines around and no one know where they are. The orphanage I served at had 175 children many of whom have lost their parents to mines, an echo of human ingenuity mixed with equal parts hatred, selfishness, pride, stupity, and technological advancements]

Afghanistan (1979–2001): 1.8 million

Iran–Iraq War (1980–88): 1 million

Sudan (1983 et seq.): 1.9 million

Kinshasa, Congo (1998 et seq.): 3.8 million

Philippines Insurgency (1899–1902): 220,000

Brazil (1900 et seq. 500,000

Amazonia (1900–1912): 250,000

Portuguese colonies (1900–1925): 325,000

French colonies (1900–1940): 200,000

Japanese War (1904–5): 130,000

German East Africa (1905–7): 175,000

Libya (1911–31): 125,000

Balkan Wars (1912–13): 140,000 [My Grandmother on my Dad’s side was born into this… this isn’t usually taught in your typical American history class]

Greco–Turkish War (1919–22): 250,000

Spanish Civil War (1936–39): 365,000

Franco Regime (1939–75): 100,000

Abyssinian Conquest (1935–41): 400,000

Finnish War (1939–40): 150,000

Greek Civil War (1943–49): 158,000

Yugoslavia, Tito’s regime (1944–80): 200,000

First Indochina War (1945–54): 400,000

Colombia (1946–58): 200,000

India (1947): 500,000

Romania (1948–89): 150,000[my parents grew up under the oppression of one of the stupidest dictators, Nicolae Ceausescu. So I listen to them when they say socialism/communism will NEVER work… it hasn’t for 100 years and won’t until the great heat death of the Universe]

In considering Pinker’s assessment of the times in which we live, the only conclusion one can profitably draw is that such an excess of stupidity is not often to be found in nature.”

Needless to say, I’m not bashing atheism. These are numbers… any historian from various different geopolitical boundaries will produce slightly different numbers, perhaps more accurate, perhaps more skewed, depending on their ethics and standards. Again, I’ll list some sources if you are curious, intellectual, have A BAJILLION HOURS of free time, or all of the above! The moral of the story here is don’t be a bigot like Dawkins & co. You are free to believe in whatever you want to believe in, I have no judgements, just my faith in what truth is, and to me Truth is a Person, Truth is Love, Love is a Person. I also do not seek to diminish the atrocities committed even to this day by members who consider themselves Christian but have NEVER actually opened their Bibles to read what Yeshua said. Westboro Baptists for instance, a group full of hate and most likely headed toward hell. In a like manner, Richard Dawkins and friends DO NOT, and SHOULD NOT represent ALL atheists with their hate rhetoric and overt bigotry… many of you my friends are atheist, perfectly decent human beings that certainly put those baptists to shame… perhaps the benefit of the doubt is the Westboro baptists are actually hypocrites while Dawkins is simply acting out the ancient idea of homo homini lupu [man is wolf to man] which seems to be the natural order, a bestial survival of the fittest mentality in a supposed evolved homo sapien. The Westboro Baptists are hypocrites because they should at the very least know the 10 commandments… it seems they’ve memorized the entire book of Leviticus, but tossed out the context and the other 99% of the bible that mentions a perfect and Holy God full of steadfast love, mercy, and compassion culminating to His arrival on earth to die for us, people, in order that we may be transformed from the inside out, to be agents of love and reconciliation, giving to the poor and needy, visiting the prisoners, supporting the afflicted and derelict of society, etc. [I typed that all in one breath]

To conclude my rant, death is death, murder is wrong. It has always been wrong because God commanded it “Thou shalt not murder” and Jesus made it an even more intense standard of perfection by saying, “if you so much as look at a person in anger, hate, [spewing insults at them] you’ve already committed murder in your heart.” [Matthew 5:22] And this means we have all broken that one… even Confucius, the great Buddha, Dalai Lama, the Pope, Ghandi, Mother Theresa, were angry and hated people in some way, shape, or form. I learned a lot… my journey back into academia may commence soon, although I’m passionate about history, anyone who knows me, my passions wax and wane with time. There are wars that I learned about in the last year which I had no idea existed… again history can repeat itself given the track record of human beings sucking. The old adage of homo homini lupus I hope, pray, and work towards the goal that it is a thing of the past, something eventually we will get right. Not on our own of course. The evidence thus far and what is exponentially increasing with the human population curve, is obviously an impossibility, but in my humble opinion, with God’s help, this is possible. I have learned to love my enemies, to love everyone always, because He first loved me.

If you want to explore more on Christian apologetics [some of whom converted from atheism], please check out works by St. Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross (<Dinesh D’Souza, Lee Strobel , Timothy Keller, Frank Turek, Ravi Zacharias, I can list more if you’d like, just DM me. I paraphrase and extract many excerpts from secular Jewish author David Berlinski’s work. Here come the sources…
you ready for this?
I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.
[shakes bootylicious bottom]
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Works Cited

“B&J”: Jacob Bercovitch and Richard Jackson, International Conflict : A Chronological Encyclopedia of Conflicts and Their Management 1945-1995 (1997)